Wednesday, April 27, 2016

JAWS review: 'brilliant and terrifying'

Steven Spielberg's Jaws, a brilliant film of so much more than just short
shark shocks, changed the cinema experience forever. It was the
original Hollywood blockbuster, the first film to gross more than $100
million.

Nobody at the time predicted such remarkable success for Jaws. When
Richard Zanuck, the Oscar-winning film producer who had been behind
great films such as The Sound of Music and Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid, started on the project the book, by first-time novelist
Peter Benchley, hadn't even been published and Spielberg's only feature
film to date, The Sugarland Express, had yet to be released.

The plot is relatively straightforward: a giant man-eating great
white shark starts killing holidaymakers on the waters of Amity Island, a
fictional New England resort. The local police chief, with the help of a
marine biologist and a professional shark hunter, goes out to sea to
track it down and kill it.

The cast is magnificent but therein lies a story. Benchley had wanted
Paul Newman to play police chief Martin Brody, Robert Redford to fill
the role of hippy ichthyologist Matt Hooper and Steve McQueen to be
grizzled shark hunter Quint. Zanuck wanted Charlton Heston, Sterling
Hayden and Jon Voight respectively. In the end, the roles went to Roy
Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw.

As a trio, their chemistry is superb. Zanuck said he was conscious
that having no star named added to the risks for the film but his three
leads could not have been better.The main problem was the demanding
practicalities of making the film. Jaws was shot on the small
Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard (and on the waters surrounding
it) and Spielberg, who was 27 at the time, remembers long days, with
about four hours of shooting film and about "eight hours anchoring boats
and trying to fight the ocean and get the shark to work".

The sharks, in this era long before CGI, were a mechanical nightmare.
"We were lucky to get one or two shots a day," said Zanuck. "The shark
was a mechanical monster that very rarely worked. Actually, we had four
of them, and they were all hydraulically operated - very crude by
today's standards."They had all these rubber-hose attachments, and there
were 16 different parts that had to work - the eye, the jaws, the tail,
the fins and so on. We had a barge bouncing up and down in the sea,
with people at all these levers, each of them controlling a particular
part. It was like an orchestra with these 16 guys on the barge, and they
had to play it perfectly each time."

But the mechanics just kept breaking down. For example, the shark
would come out of the water with its eye closed, and we'd have to
abandon the shot. It was so agonising. You'd have actors hanging around
for days, waiting for just one shot."

The problems ended up working in the film's favour. The opening
segment is one of the most famous death scenes in movie history. Susan
Backlinie was the skinny-dipping bather who takes a fateful moonlit
swim, splashing about merrily. The silence is terrifying, the sea an
endless dark pool.

Suddenly, the whelping starts, the helpless struggle against a sea
monster we are left to image, the creature that is dragging her under.
It's an utterly terrifying moment."In the script," said Zanuck, "we had
the shark in that scene, but the mechanics weren't working. Steven made
it so much more horrifying by having shots from underneath of the girl's
legs dangling there, then the girl being ripped apart."

All without the audience getting even a glimpse of her attacker. "If
we'd had a computerised shark, we would have overdone it, and a lot of
that suspense and build-up, which was not really intended, would have
been lost."Through the years, Steven has been praised for holding back
on the shark and waiting, but it was never planned that way. We just
didn't have it working."

"Jaws was my Vietnam. It was basically naive people against nature,
and nature beat us every day," Spielberg later said.The terror, panic
and small town politics are all brilliantly done but this is also a film
about bravery and friendship and the scenes in which the trio bond as
they sit out at sea waiting to fight death itself are moving and witty.

There is also a memorably great line. “We’re gonna need a bigger
boat,” says Chief Brody when he finally realised the size of the beast
they are facing.The beautifully simple and iconic movie poster, the
evocative and haunting Grammy-winning score of John Williams (All
together now: Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh…) and the scary moments (the
head and the boat) all help make Jaws one of the great films of the 20th
century.

Jaws won three Oscars - Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score,
and Best Sound - and spawned three (poor) sequels. It is as thrilling
today as when it first hit cinema screens on June 20 1975.